National Planning for Public Library Service: The Work and Ideas of Lionel McColvin

Black, Alistair

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/1695 Copy

Description

Title

National Planning for Public Library Service: The Work and Ideas of Lionel McColvin

Author(s)

Black, Alistair

Issue Date

2004

Keyword(s)

• Library science --History
• Information science --History

Abstract

Lionel McColvin (1896–1976) is regarded as one of the most infl uential fi gures in the history of British librarianship. In the specifi c context of 150 years of public librarianship in Britain, his reputation as a visionary inflfl uence is second only to that of the nineteenth-century pioneer Edward Edwards, while in the twentieth century his reputation is unsurpassed. McColvin was the major voice in the mid-twentieth-century movement to reconstruct and modernize public libraries. He is best known as author of The Public Library System of Great Britain: A Report on Its Present Condition with Proposals for Post-war Reorganization, published in 1942 at a moment of intense wartime efforts to assemble plans for social and economic reconstruction. The “McColvin Report,” as it came to be termed, was a landmark in the struggle to de-Victorianize the public library, not least by emphasizing the institution’s universalism and its function as a national, not just a civic, agency. This article briefl y describes McColvin’s notable contribution to twentieth-century librarianship, resulting from his work as a public librarian, as a leading fi gure in the Library Association, and as an infl uential player in the international library movement. The article’s core aim is to offer a critical appraisal of McColvin’s vision for public libraries by placing it in the context of the project to build a better postwar world. This project was defi ned by the conceptualization and development of a welfare state in Britain, the underlying values of which can be seen to correspond to McColvin’s national plan for a rejuvenated public library system. McColvin drew on the spirit of the time to produce a plan for public libraries that was shot through with social idealism and commitment and with a confi dence in the need for intervention by the state—values that perhaps provide lessons for current and future library and information policymakers and professionals.

Publisher

Graduate School of Library and Information Science. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

ISSN

0024-2594

Type of Resource

text

Language

en

Permalink

http://hdl.handle.net/2142/1695

Copyright and License Information

Copyright owned by Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. 2004.

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